Huge Explosion Detected in Space

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NASA’s Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists claim is the largest gamma-ray burst ever detected, AFP reports. The blast produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

“Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,” NASA astrophysicist Frank Reddy said in the article. “If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don’t stop for anything—they just bore through and that’s why we can see them from enormous distances.”

The visible blast occurred back in September somewhere in the Carina constellation, which is about 12.2 billion light years away. That means that while we may have first heard of it back in September, it actually happened before our own solar system formed.